Bernardo BertolucciBernardo Bertolucci (Italian: [berˈnardo bertoˈluttʃi]; born
16 March 1941) is an Italian director and screenwriter, whose films
include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor
(for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director), The Sheltering
Sky,
Stealing BeautyStealing Beauty and The Dreamers. In recognition of his work, he
was presented with the inaugural Honorary
Palme d'OrPalme d'Or Award at the
opening ceremony of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.[2] Since 1979, he
has been married to screenwriter Clare Peploe.[3]

Contents

1 Biography

1.1 Origins
1.2 Starting out with Pasolini
1.3 Controversy surrounding Last Tango in Paris
1.4 Becoming world famous
1.5 Red Harvest
1.6 Academy Awards with The Last Emperor
1.7 His latest films
1.8 As a screenwriter, producer and actor

2 Politics and personal beliefs
3 Awards

3.1 Cinematographic awards

4 Filmography
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

Biography[edit]
Origins[edit]
Bertolucci was born in the Italian city of Parma, in the region of
Emilia-Romagna. He is the elder son of Ninetta (Giovanardi), a
teacher, and Attilio Bertolucci, who was a poet, a reputed art
historian, anthologist and film critic.[4] His mother was born in
Australia, to an Italian father and an Irish mother.[5][6] Having been
raised in an artistic environment, Bertolucci began writing at the age
of fifteen, and soon after received several prestigious literary
prizes including the Premio Viareggio for his first book. His father's
background helped his career: the elder Bertolucci had helped the
Italian filmmaker
Pier Paolo PasoliniPier Paolo Pasolini publish his first novel, and
Pasolini reciprocated by hiring Bertolucci as first assistant in Rome
on
AccattoneAccattone (1961).
Bertolucci had one brother, the theatre director and playwright
Giuseppe (27 February 1947 – 16 June 2012). His cousin was the film
producer Giovanni Bertolucci (24 June 1940 – 17 February 2005), with
whom he worked on a number of films.
Starting out with Pasolini[edit]
Bertolucci initially wished to become a poet like his father. With
this goal in mind, he attended the Faculty of Modern Literature of the
University of
RomeRome from 1958 to 1961, where his film career as an
assistant director to Pasolini began.[7] Shortly after, Bertolucci
left the University without graduating. In 1962, at the age of 22, he
directed his first feature film, produced by Tonino Cervi with a
screenplay by Pasolini, called
La commare seccaLa commare secca (1962). The film is a
murder mystery, following a prostitute's homicide. Bertolucci uses
flashbacks to piece together the crime and the person who committed
it. The film which shortly followed was his acclaimed Before the
Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1964).
The boom of Italian cinema, which gave Bertolucci his start, slowed in
the 1970s as directors were forced to co-produce their films with
several of the American, Swedish, French, and German companies and
actors due to the effects of the global economic recession on the
Italian film industry.
Controversy surrounding Last Tango in Paris[edit]
Bertolucci caused controversy in 1972 with the film Last Tango in
Paris, starring Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider,
Jean-Pierre LéaudJean-Pierre Léaud and
Massimo Girotti. The film presents Brando's character, Paul, as he
uses an anonymous affair to cope with the violent death of his wife by
emotionally and physically dominating a young woman, Jeane
(Schneider). The depictions of Schneider, then 19 years old, were
regarded as exploitative. In one scene, Paul anally rapes Jeane using
butter as a lubricant. The use of butter was not in the script;
Bertolucci and Brando had discussed it, but they did not tell
Schneider. She said in 2007 that she had cried "real tears" during the
scene and had felt humiliated and "a little raped".[8][9][10] In 2013
Bertolucci said that he had withheld the information from Schneider to
generate a real "reaction of frustration and rage".[9] Brando alleged
that Bertolucci had wanted the characters to have real sex, but Brando
and Schneider both said it was simulated.[8] In 2016 Bertolucci
released a statement where he clarified that Schneider had known of
the violence to be depicted in the scene, but had not been told about
the use of butter.[11]
Following the scandal surrounding the film's release, Schneider became
a drug addict and suicidal.[12] She later became a women's rights
advocate, in particular fighting for more female film directors, more
respect for female actors and better representation of women in film
and media.[13] Criminal proceedings were brought against Bertolucci in
Italy for the anal-sex scene; the film was sequestered by the
censorship commission and all copies were ordered destroyed. An
Italian court revoked Bertolucci's civil rights for five years and
gave him a four-month suspended prison sentence.[14] In 1978 the
Appeals Court of Bologna ordered three copies of the film to be
preserved in the national film library with the stipulation that they
could not be viewed, until Bertolucci was later able to re-submit it
for general distribution with no cuts.[15][16][17][18]
Becoming world famous[edit]

Bertolucci's star on Walk of Fame

Bertolucci increased his fame with his next few films, from 1900
(1976), an epic depiction of the struggles of farmers in
Emilia-RomagnaEmilia-Romagna from the beginning of the 20th century up to World War
II with an impressive international cast (Robert De Niro, Gérard
Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Sterling Hayden, Burt Lancaster,
Dominique Sanda) to La Luna, set in
RomeRome and in Emilia-Romagna, in
which Bertolucci deals with the thorny issue of drugs and incest, and
finally
La tragedia di un uomo ridicoloLa tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (1981), with Ugo Tognazzi.
Bertolucci appeared on the
Radio FourRadio Four programme Front Row on April 29,
2013, where he chose
La Dolce VitaLa Dolce Vita (a film directed by Fellini) for
the "Cultural Exchange".
Red Harvest[edit]
During the making of Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci toyed with the
idea of adapting Dashiell Hammett's book
Red HarvestRed Harvest into a feature
film. That material had formed the basis for Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which
in turn was the basis for Sergio Leone's
A Fistful of DollarsA Fistful of Dollars (Per un
pugno di dollari). Countless others have used its premise since. The
reason for this was his wanting to branch out into other forms of
cinema. Bertolucci wrote two screenplays.[citation needed] The first
draft was written almost entirely as a political film, from which
emerged a story inspired by socialist syndicalism of the late 1920s in
America. The second draft was more faithful to Hammett's original
story and changed the setting to 1934. Actors considered for the role
The Continental OpThe Continental Op were Robert Redford,
Clint EastwoodClint Eastwood and Jack
Nicholson. In Rome, Bertolucci and
Warren BeattyWarren Beatty talked in great
detail about the film, and in 1982 Bertolucci left Europe for Los
Angeles, where he was to shoot Red Harvest, but five years went by and
the film was never made.
Academy Awards with The Last Emperor[edit]
In 1987, Bertolucci directed the epic The Last Emperor, a biographical
film telling the life story of
Aisin-GioroAisin-Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of
China. The film was independently produced by British producer Jeremy
Thomas, who Bertolucci worked with almost exclusively from then on.
The film was independently financed and three years in the making.
Bertolucci won the Academy Award for Best Director. Bertolucci
co-wrote the film with Mark Peploe.
The Last EmperorThe Last Emperor uses Puyi's life
as a mirror that reflects China's passage from feudalism through
revolution to its current state.
At the 60th Academy Awards,
The Last EmperorThe Last Emperor won all nine Oscars for
which it was nominated: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing,
Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Best Cinematography,
Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction-Set
Decoration, Best Music, Original Score and Best Sound.
The Last EmperorThe Last Emperor was the first feature film ever authorized by the
government of the People's Republic of China to film in the Forbidden
City. Bertolucci had proposed the film to the Chinese government as
one of two possible projects. The other film was La Condition Humaine
by André Malraux. The Chinese government preferred The Last Emperor,
and made no restrictions on the content.
The Last EmperorThe Last Emperor became the
first western film made in China and about the country to be produced
with full Chinese government cooperation since 1949.
His latest films[edit]
After The Last Emperor, and Little Buddha, the director went back to
Italy to film, as well as to his old themes with varying results from
both critics and the public. He filmed
Stealing BeautyStealing Beauty in 1996,[19]
then The Dreamers in 2003, which describes the political passions and
sexual revolutions of two siblings in Paris in 1968.[20]
In 2007, he received the
Golden LionGolden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival
for his life's work, and in 2011 he also received the
Palme d'OrPalme d'Or at
the Cannes Film Festival.[21]
In 2012, his latest film Me and You was screened out of competition at
the 2012 Cannes Film Festival[22][23] and was released early in 2013
in the UK. The film is an adaptation of Niccolò Ammaniti's
young-adult's book
Io e te (You and Me). The screenplay for the movie
was written by Bertolucci himself, Umberto Contarello and Niccolò
Ammaniti.[24] Bertolucci originally intended to shoot the film in 3D
but later changed his mind about this, calling the idea "vulgarly
commercial".[25]
As a screenwriter, producer and actor[edit]
Bertolucci has also written many screenplays, both for his own films
as well as for films directed by others, two of which he also
produced.
His only experience as an actor was in the film Golem: The Spirit of
Exile, directed by
Amos GitaiAmos Gitai in 1992.
Politics and personal beliefs[edit]
Bertolucci is an atheist.[26]
Bertolucci's films are often very political. He is a professed Marxist
and like Luchino Visconti, who similarly employed many foreign artists
during the late 1960s, Bertolucci uses his films to express his
political views; hence they are often autobiographical as well as
highly controversial. His political films were preceded by others
re-evaluating history. The Conformist (1970) criticised Fascist
ideology, touched upon the relationship between nationhood and
nationalism, as well as issues of popular taste and collective memory,
all amid an international plot by Mussolini to assassinate a
politically active leftist professor of philosophy in Paris. 1900 also
analyses the struggle of Left and Right.
On 27 September 2009, Bertolucci was one of the signers of the appeal
to the Swiss government to release Roman Polanski, who was being held
while waiting to be extradited to the United States.[27]
On
TwitterTwitter on 24 April 2015, Bertolucci participated in
#whomademyclothes, Fashion Revolution's anti-sweatshop campaign
commemorating the 2013 Savar building collapse, the deadliest accident
in the history of the garment industry.[28]
Awards[edit]
Cinematographic awards[edit]